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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

#1396: Wayne Boettcher

More creationists, and this time a small fish. I am not sure
what Wayne Boettcher’s day job might be, but he got our attention with an essay
he wrote for the StopTheACLU page trying to debunk evolution. Just the idea
behind the StopTheACLU is pretty abysmally insane, by the way – somehow these
people have got it into their minds that ACLU is working against religious freedom, and the persecution complex and delusions and lack of understanding of what religious freedom involves needed to reach that conclusion is pretty breathtaking.

In any case, the essay in question (discussed here)
is itself a pretty breathtaking example of how the lowest Dunning-Kruger quartile confidently exploits their own total lack of insight to attack
evidence, reason and expertise. Highlights include his argument from how
disagreement among experts is evidence against evolution: “Scientist don’t
agree on fossils. Some say dinosaurs are lizards, others that they are birdlike
creatures who evolved into birds” (yeah, that’s Boettcher’s scientific acumen
at work), and his very standard argument from hoaxes: “[S]hady paleontologists
and evolution crackpots have gone overboard in their frenetic attempts to hoax
the public. From Piltdown Man to ‘Lucy’ missing link hoaxes abound through history.” Yes, he names two, one
of which is not a hoax, the other of which was procured by an amateur and
rejected by scientists (he also alludes to peppered moths and Haeckel’s embryos,
which only someone who has no idea about the science would even consider doing).
But you know: only scientists care about accuracy and details; Boettcher surely
doesn’t. He also recommends Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution.

Diagnosis:
Another know-nothing who has made a fool of himself in public. We doubt that
he’ll ever know.